I've long entertained a dubious regard for the practice of lying to children about the existence of Santa Claus. Parents might claim that it serves to make children's lives more magical and exciting, but as a general rule, children are adequately equipped to create fantasies of their own without their parents' intervention. The two reasons I suspect rest at the bottom line are adherence to tradition, and finding it cute to see one's children believing ridiculous things.
Personally, I considered this to be a rather indecent way to treat one's own children, and have sometimes wondered whether a large proportion of conspiracy theorists owe their origins to the realization that practically all the adults in the country really are conspiring to deceive children for no tangible benefit. However, since I began frequenting this site, I've been exposed to the alternate viewpoint that this realization may be good for developing rationalists, because it provides children with the experience of discovering that they hold beliefs which are wrong and absurd, and that they must reject them.
So, how did the Santa deception affect you personally? How do you think your life might have been different without it? If your parents didn't do it to you, what are your impressions on the experience of not being lied to when most other children are?
Also, I promise to upvote anyone who links to an easy to register for community of conspiracy theorists where they would not be averse to being asked the same question.
I've had similar thoughts (I have two small children, so I'm super interested in ideas about education), but on reflection, I think this would be a bad idea. It took the greatest minds of prior generations entire lifetimes to come up with the breakthroughs in science and mathematics that current work is building upon. It would be unrealistic and counterproductive to expect a child to independently replicate the invention of the zero, Mendelian inheritance, Newtonian physics, etc. Even if they were given a lot of hints.
Instead, what I'd like to do with my kids is to put the advancement of human knowledge firmly into its historical and cultural context. So instead of "this is geometry, now memorize the Pythagorean theorem," we would study the architecture and building methods of the ancient Greeks, learn about the problems that Pythagoras had to solve, learn about the alternate methods and theories that existed at the time, learn about his advancements and insight right along with his crazy numerology and religion, and then learn about how subsequent mathematicians sorted out his important discoveries from his wacky personal beliefs. So it would be not just "this is geometry," but "this is geometry, this is why and how geometry was developed, these are some false ideas that were initially part of geometry, this is how the truth was winnowed out, and these are the problems that have yet to be solved." The idea being to teach the process of discovery along with the discoveries themselves.
That sounds like a good educational process, but once they have some grounding in that, I think it would be good to move on to not telling them the right answers, but presenting them with a number of propositions, and telling them
"These are the possibilities that were raised at the time. Can you work out which is actually correct, and how they figured it out?"